5.6.7 Development Journal

[PyTom]

Threw some time into the quickstart:

http://www.renpy.org/wiki/renpy/doc/tut ... Quickstart

It's nowhere near done, but I'd appreciate comments/editing.

[PyTom]

And, I've finished the Quickstart. I'd appreciate it if people could copy-edit it for me, and also give me feedback about it. I'd especially appreciate feedback from people who are new to Ren'Py, as they're the main target audience.

I still need to go and add the working examples to the demo.

[bardsmanship]

IMHO, it's an improvement over the reference manual, but still not very friendly to newbies who've never programmed anything before. I think one of the problems is the frequent use of words like 'declaration', 'string', 'argument' etc. that sound pretty alien. Also, if its meant to be the very first thing people read, it should probably be pared down a little. For example, under Images, there's this block of text:

We have a scene statement on line 11. This statement clears out the screen, and shows the "bg meadow" image. The next line is a show statement, which shows the "sylvie smile" image on the screen. A show statement replaces an image with the same tag, if it's on the screen. If not, it shows the image on the screen, closer to the user than any other image.

It's all true, but it seems unneccessary to overload new users of renpy/people to the website with so much information. Just saying that the scene statement shows the bg image on the screen and the show statement shows the sylvie smile image on the screen should be enough. What's more, it will emphasize Ren'py's ease of use.

Basically, I think the Ren'py Web Tutorial is both more friendly and inspiring to the average newbie. The Quickstart Manual is still that, a manual. I don't know, maybe we could have both but specify which is more suitable to people with programmer/non-programmer backgrounds?

Edit: To be more concise, when I read the Ren'py Web Tutorial, it's really easy to understand what's going on. There are examples for just about every little thing - just look at the page on Defining Characters for instance - so it's very easy to follow. The Quickstart Manual on the other hand, tells me a lot of things but it doesn't show me how they are significant, or why. It sort of dilutes Renpy's magic, I suppose. The basic point being made sometimes gets lost under the deluge of minutiae that follows.

[PyTom]

bardsmanship, thanks for the comments.

Well, we'll certainly still have both. An idea is that I wanted to go and include the Quickstart with Ren'Py, and have the examples coded in as part of the demo, so people can see them in action.

I'm hoping someone will step up and be bold about editing the quickstart, and hopefully in a few weeks, when 6.0 comes out, we'll have something reasonable there.

I'm thinking I'll probably release 5.6.7 this weekend anyway, just because I want to get all the new goodies out to everyone.

[Laveil Kurtis]

The Quickstar Manual is very good IMO. But some parts needs a bit of simplification.

With "This is for that" is enough. There's explanations of why "this" is for "that" in the tutorial, and more extended in the Refence Manual.

Any new user will follow the manual, but doing more like "step by step" will be more easy to follow it rather than putting the entire script and then explaining what the script does.

And that's all. It's still under construction, but in a few weeks it will be perfect. When I finish the spanish translation of the Reference Manual, I'll work on the Quickstart (in a month or two I think)